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Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

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Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#291

Post by downrightmike »

h4l0 wrote: post #9

I really don't want to sound cynical about this great initiative(!) but it saddens me that among many open modern languages and tools, they instead opted for Delphi. I cannot think of a single positive reason behind this decision in 2020. All I can think of is that the people that came to this conclusion are the ones who graduated from Computer Science related studies in ~1998-2004~ and immediately got themselves in…

Could just be most of Turkey's software i sin Delphi, or they plan on it being delphi. How much of other nations are similar with cobol etc? Except that no one is teaching it.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#292

Post by [deleted] »

non-entity wrote: post #70
revanx_ wrote: post #30

I programmed in Delphi for 8 years, then I switched to FreePascal. Yes, the grass is greener on the other side, and it's also free.

Going to start a project in in FreePascal soon because it seems to be the only [not abandonware] compiler for a high level language that still supports targeting 8086.

[deleted]

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#293

Post by thisrod »

tgflynn wrote: post #282
cr0sh wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the world's top self driving car engineers reckons we might never get Level 5. I have some minor-level experience with self-driving car software, algorithms, etc. The majority of this is from various MOOCs I have participated in over the years, as well as research papers, books, and other things I have read and consumed. In short, I am not an expert, but I am not unfamiliar with the technology, either. I per…

> My reasoning is that people will only trust perfection when it comes to riding in a self-driving vehicle. From what I've seen I think your model of human behavior is flawed. Aircraft have been mostly fly-by-wire for decades and software flaws have led to some crashes (most recently those of the 737 Max), but that hasn't stopped people from flying in planes. People have already been killed by self-driving cars, but…

The usual practice is for autopilots to be switched off when the plane is within 200 feet of the ground. (Or a similar distance.) I think a self driving car would be a much easier sell if it never came within 200 feet of anything it could hit.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#294

Post by madhadron »

mirekrusin wrote: post #218
zwaps wrote: post #59

I mean, one may assume incompetence and corruption. And perhaps that's the case. But on the other hand, teaching languages are not the same as production languages. There are a number of languages that may be more powerful, but I think Delphi is a decent choice for teaching. * You want to teach principles. Delphi allows you to teach OOP principles. You may or may not agree that OOP should be the starting paradigm, bu…

You may love or hate js but it makes great language to start with, runs in your browser and has infinite labyrinths of complexity in every direction - perfect for students to play with. Why nobody is using it to teach?

Because it's a nightmare with ridiculous missing hunks, like the fact that you can't put anything but primitive types in a Set usefully. Why would you use it to teach?

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#295

Post by jetti »

mamcx wrote: post #217
arghwhat wrote: post #14

This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…

The mistake is assuming Delphi is bad and stupid. Delphi is MUCH better than C and C++. Miles ahead. Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it. What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it. Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet: - Some of the problems th…

The problem I had with Delphi was Embarcardero's pricing. At the time I was looking into it there was no express license or anything similar so it would've been a few hundred dollars to just try and learn. Contrast that with Visual Studio Express which was free and allowed me to learn C#. There was a significant cost to learning Delphi. Since then, however, I discovered Free Pascal and its ability to support multiple platforms and targets. Granted, I abandoned my journey of learning Object Pascal a long time ago.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#296

Post by jetti »

vintagedave wrote: post #206
pbourke wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has pretty low entry barriers Cost being the obvious large one. Every time I’ve had an inkling of interest in Delphi, I pop by the website and nope out within a few minutes after finding the pricing page.

There's a free Community edition, which you can use as a hobbyist, or as a company until you reach a revenue limit. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter For the commercial versions, AFAIK overall it's less than Visual Studio, but when amortized over a couple of years. Slightly different pricing model so trickier to compare.

The community edition is relatively new. Before that, there was some watered down version for $199 (if I'm remembering correctly). Back when I looked into it there was no way I could afford or justify spending that kind of money on a language that I may not even like or want to continue learning.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#297

Post by MrGilbert »

badsectoracula wrote: post #213
throwaway8941 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how I remember it. An empty statically linked VCL GUI application used to weigh about 700 KB. Just as stupid edgy kids usually do, we were looking at other "C++ applications" a dozen KBs in size and were ranting about Delphi being so bloated and terrible. Of course, it was due to them being built on top of pure Win32 API, or being dynamically linked to a similar "bloated" runtime. It's not like we had an i…

Depends on the Delphi version. Delphi 2 (what i used and still use sometimes) creates a VCL app at around 200KB. Later versions added a bit, but i think it wasn't until after Delphi 7 that sizes ballooned. However i have a feeling that MrGilbert refers to using the Windows API directly without VCL in which case you can create very small executables.

Yes, exactly - sorry I didn't clarify. There were folks out there who created stripped down versions of Systems32 classes, so you had a basic skeleton running.

Maybe I should write a progam like that, just for the fun of it. It still works nowadays. I might even get away with FreePascal. I'll give it a try. :)

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#298

Post by planteen »

JackRabbitSlim wrote: post #280
speleo_engr wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can learn a lot but I have no idea why you would choose Turbo C in 2020 over say a Raspberry Pi with GCC. Turbo C (discontinued in 1990) is going to expose a bunch of irrelevant things today, as even most microcontrollers are 32-bit: painful 16-bit near/far memory model a single task operating system (DOS) that has been long obsolete no support for networking or threads I could go on and on.

In going from zero to programmer those aren't bad things, they are a simplified learning model. Would you advocate pilots stop learning to fly in single engine prop planes and instead jump right into the cockpit of an Airbus because that's what they will encounter in the workforce? Any why are doctors practicing on dead people when clearly they can't possibly help them or cure anything that way...

A 16-bit space is not at all simplified, it's far more complex. Because of that, it is a terrible choice. It's a much more difficult memory model to learn in. In a flat 32-bit address space, a pointer is a pointer and it just works. It's much easier to conceptualize and learn on. Have you ever programmed for a bank switched memory computer? It's a nightmare. It's extra mental gymnastics pushed on the developer that have been irrelevant for a long time.

I don't think your example is a valid comparison. It's more like do you think all teenagers need to learn to drive a horse driven carriage before they learn on a modern car?

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#299

Post by planteen »

beamatronic wrote: post #283
speleo_engr wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can learn a lot but I have no idea why you would choose Turbo C in 2020 over say a Raspberry Pi with GCC. Turbo C (discontinued in 1990) is going to expose a bunch of irrelevant things today, as even most microcontrollers are 32-bit: painful 16-bit near/far memory model a single task operating system (DOS) that has been long obsolete no support for networking or threads I could go on and on.

None of that matters to someone learning how to implement a stack, a linked list, quick sort, etc.

It does though, if you mix near and far pointers, you are going to be getting crashes. Pointer equality and comparison are non-trivial. Whereas on a modern 32-bit CPU you don't have any such distinction.

Re: Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students

#300

Post by MrGilbert »

gwd wrote: post #130
MrGilbert wrote: post #8

I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is quite powerful. It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we creat…

> as a hobbiest Grammar note: "hobbyist". "-ist" is the suffix for, "A person who does this thing"; "-est" is the suffix for changing an adjective into a superlative: "Yours is hobby, his is hobbier, mine is the hobbiest."

Non-native speaker here, so.. thanks for the input! I appreciate that. :)
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